Deserted Village

For this week’s WordPress Photo challenge is Landscape I’ve chosen to show some photographs taken a couple of years ago on one of my favourite walks on the Pennine Moors in Lancashire. Part of the route follows the narrow, cobbled road to the abandoned settlement of Haslingden Grane.

Haslingden Grane is a valley west of the town of Haslingden in Lancashire. Around the middle of the nineteenth century it contained a thriving community. About 1500 people lived in the valley, some 600 of them in a village close to the main road to Blackburn, and the rest in several dozen farms and hamlets scattered around the valley. (There’s a wealth of information about the lives of the settlers from the 16th century right up to the 1920’s on the website Abandoned Communities UK)